Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
Once I got settled in, the daily routine wasn’t so bad. You’d wake up, do your prayer and meditation, make your bed, and shower. Everyone in my bungalow was considerate and cleaned up so we wouldn’t get negative write-ups and extra homework. My roommates fascinated me. I felt horrible for the white-trash kid from Florida: I could see that he was struggling and that his chances for recovery weren’t so good, especially with a wife who shared the same obsession. A lot of the other people there were facing their third strike and looking at serious jail time if they didn’t straighten out.
After tidying your room, you’d go down to the cafeteria, which was a fun place to hang out. The food was all fat, starch, and sugar, the worst imaginable, but it was intended to put some weight back on your frame. Everyone piled on the food. There was an enormous selection of desserts at every meal, including breakfast. I wasn’t eating meat in there, but I was hitting the sweets big-time.
My typical day at Impact was different from most others’. For some reason, they didn’t treat me like a normal person. Everyone got work assignments like mowing the lawn and mopping the floor, but I was assigned to an advanced relapse-prevention class, which was intense and time-consuming. During the course of this class, we all got a day or two to draw a big calendar of the last eight years of our lives on an enormous chalkboard. Then we entered the major events and dates when our relapses occurred and what preceded and followed them. I was in this class with twenty other chronic relapsers, and they started pointing out the obvious—that each time I ended a relationship with a woman, it precipitated a relapse. I realized I had an issue, that there was something in the dynamic of hurting somebody’s feelings that always sent me out the door. That really manifested after I broke up with Jaime and started going out with a number of different girls for short amounts of time. It was go out with a girl for a month, break up, relapse.
I stayed at Impact my prescribed length of time and did all of the work in the relapse class, including filling out pages and pages of questionnaires, which was a psychologically productive thing to do. When you start putting pen to paper, you see a side of your personal truth that doesn’t otherwise reveal itself in conversation or thought. I also liked these psychological exercises because there was a young hot shrink who had recently come to Impact. I spent a lot of time in her office. We’d break out the Rorschach tests and go out and sit in the shade of this compound, and I’d look at the inkblots and make some sexual innuendos, and we’d both flirt. There was no point in doing serious psychotherapy, since I was getting out in less than four weeks, so it was just nice to spend some time together.
I left Impact and got back on board with my recovery. I was feeling pretty optimistic and healthy and happy about my life and the band. Lindy had booked a summer tour for us, so my intention was to start getting in shape for the road. One Sunday morning that spring, I was on my motorcycle, going to my favorite meeting, which was in a rec room in a park at Third and Gardner. I was moving at a good clip, as I was prone to do, but I’d never had any real mishaps on my bike. I’d studied the road conditions and exercised caution at intersections and assumed that cars would pull out at inopportune moments from driveways or parking spots. I was always alert and prepared to deal with those scenarios.
All this was going through my mind as I flew down Gardner, which was a narrow side street with cars parked on both sides. In a split hair of a moment, this car pulled out of a parking spot and started to make a U-turn, effectively cutting off the entire street. Normally, you’d have a back-door exit, even if it meant cutting onto the sidewalk, but now there was no way out; this idiot had blocked the whole street, and there were no driveways accessible. I used both my brakes, but the car was too close. There was an incredibly fast and violent collision, so strong that the bike pierced the vehicle. I flew off the bike and jackknifed right into the point where the driver’s door met the engine compartment.
Amazingly enough, I hit the car and proceeded to somersault forward, landing square on my feet on the other side of the car. I kept my balance and started running, so I assumed that by some miracle, I was okay. Except when I looked down at my arm, it wasn’t an arm anymore. My hand had been shoved up into my forearm, so I now had a double-decker, big, bulbous club of a forearm and no hand.
“Oh my God,” I thought. “This is really, really wrong-looking.”
Without stopping to consider how badly I was injured, I ran into the closest house without knocking. I took a few steps into the living room, thinking I’d grab the phone and call an ambulance, but then the initial shock wore off, and the worst pain of my life jolted my body. There was no time to call for help, so I turned around and ran back outside and flagged down a convertible that happened to be occupied by two women I knew who were on their way to the same meeting as I had been.
I ignored the driver of the car I had hit, who wanted to trade insurance information, and jumped into the backseat. We made a beeline for Cedars-Sinai. Later I would learn that the hand has more nerve cells than any other part of the body, which explained the intense pain, but at that point it just felt like my hand had been immersed in a hot bottle of lava. I was convinced I’d never have a hand again.
Within five minutes, I was at the hospital, being wheeled into emergency surgery. Just my luck, an amazing hand specialist, Dr. Kulber, was on duty. But first they had to prep me for surgery, which entailed giving me a healthy dose of morphine. I felt nothing. I turned to the nurse and said, “Unfortunately, over a lifetime of misbehavior, I’ve attained a rather enormous resistance to the opiate family of drugs. You’re probably going to have to go ahead and double that dose right away.” Another shot. Nothing. It wasn’t even putting a dent in the pain. This process went on and on. They wound up giving me seven doses of morphine before I got some relief.
The pain was gone, and the nurses started looking mighty attractive, and the next thing I knew, I had my hand up the nurse’s skirt and was flirting with a female doctor. I was the fucking patient from hell who had gotten the most morphine in Cedars-Sinai history.
It took Dr. Kulber five hours to reconstruct my hand from that pulverized mass of bone and matter. After a few days in the hospital, they fixed me up with a specialty cast that went all the way up to my shoulder. It wasn’t until I got home that I recognized how dependent we are on our hands. Even something as mundane as wiping your ass became a big issue. I had to train my left hand to do things it had never done before. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t open a door or a window; getting dressed and tying my shoes were nearly impossible.
For some reason, all this didn’t really bring me down. I hated not being able to sleep comfortably, and I didn’t enjoy the excruciating pain, but I kept the outlook that I would find a way to use my hand again. And so began many, many months of hand therapy. I was lucky enough to find Dr. Dors, a Burbank physician whose practice revolved around rehabbing hands. He had a unique way of doing therapy: You were placed in a room with twenty other people who had severe hand injuries, all helping one another. When you see people with much worse injuries than your own, you thank God and decide you can deal with it. It took me nine months, but I got back most of the strength in that injured hand.
We had to cancel dates in Alaska and Hawaii because of my accident, but then Lindy called and asked if I could play the festival at Mount Fuji at the end of July. We were headlining and making a lot of money for that one show, and we hadn’t worked that entire year. By that time, my cast was down to my elbow, so I figured if I just kept my arm in my sling, playing was doable.
There was only one catch. As we checked in to our hotel, we found out that there was a super-typhoon coming directly at us from the South. It was estimated to hit our area just when we were going to be onstage. The morning of our show, the rains began. But there were eighty thousand Japanese out on this mountainside, so not playing wasn’t an option. The opening acts went on, and all the time, we were keeping an eye on the weather reports, which all said that the big one was gett
Finally, it was time to play. We looked out at the audience, and the kids were soaking wet and frozen to the bone. People were being taken away suffering from hypothermia. But no one was leaving voluntarily. So we hit the stage, and there was a little bit of a cover, though not enough to keep the windy rain from flying around. The energy from this storm was building everybody up, so we nailed the set. Chado was banging out the beat, and Dave was really going for it. It was the first time in a while that I’d been sober for a few months straight, so I was feeling great. The stronger we played, the stronger the wind got. At one point I remember being up at the front of the stage on the mike, and the wind was so robust that I leaned in to it and it held me up. Then the winds got even heavier, and shit started to blow off the stage. The equipment was still working, so we kept playing until the lighting rig blew away. We were about eight songs into the show, and we’d fulfilled our contractual and moral obligations by then, so we ran for our lives.
August 1997 was pretty uneventful. I was back in L.A., still living with my little extended family. But when September rolled around, I got the old familiar urgings and decided it was time to go get a bunch of drugs and do them for just one day. There was no downside, because Jane’s Addiction were doing a comeback tour that fall, and Flea had decided to fill in as the bass player, which meant Flea and Dave had their own separate thing for a few months, and I had plenty of time on my hands.
Out of deference to little baby Cash, I decided to get high in my car and not bring that energy into the house. So I got my stuff and started driving back toward Hollywood, but I was too impatient, so I pulled over onto a side street and fired up my pipe. After a few hits, I got paranoid and decided to check in to a hotel to continue my bacchanal.
I found a nice fancy hotel down on Pico and Beverly and thought that would do for a night. I went up to the counter, and the desk person lit up. “Mr. Kiedis! It’s an honor to have you in our hotel,” he said. One night turned into two nights, which turned into three nights. At one point I had to drive downtown to replenish my supplies. I slept for a day and woke up and ordered plates and plates of quarter-pound burgers. Then the whole cycle began again.
Days went by, getting high, getting high, getting high. Each day I’d have to call the front desk and tell them my plans had changed and I was staying for yet another day. So it was drugs, drugs, drugs, sleep, sleep, sleep. Wake up emaciated, beat down, sad, depressed, demoralized, hurt, lonely, destroyed; order room service and watch a little TV. This went on for a few weeks. I woke up one night around eleven and discovered that I had copped a heroin habit. I ate some food and looked at myself in the mirror and said, “Jesus Christ, you’re a wreck, brother. You better go hide under a mountain of cocaine and heroin right away.”
I checked my pockets. I had some feeble amount of change, but I wasn’t worried, because I knew I had about five grand in a suit pocket at my house. That would cover me for another week. In fact, my whole closet was filled with the accoutrements of serious damage-doing. I had jackets that had drugs, jackets that had pipes, jackets that had syringes, jackets that had money, jackets that had Polaroid sex photos, the whole gamut. I would have to scoot home, run up to my closet, grab the cash, and deal with Sherry and Louis. I was a possessed madman, so I planned to tell them to back off, mind their own business, and I’d get better when I got better. If I didn’t, that was the price I had to pay.
I drove up to my house, pressed the garage-door opener, pulled in, and got a huge shock. The garage was empty. My bikes were gone, my surfboard was gone, the crazy mirror on the wall, the shelving unit, all gone. All the concrete was polished and impeccably clean. My heart started pounding as I tried to come up with an explanation. Maybe they wanted to have the place painted so they took everything out. Or maybe there was a spill of some kind. But it didn’t look like somebody had cleaned up. Everything was gone.
I climbed up the stairs, slammed my key into the door, and prepared to do battle with Louis and Sherry. I opened the door and walked right into The Twilight Zone, except it was real. Nothing was in the house. No furniture, no paintings, no posters, no silverware, no pots and pans, no glasses, no plates, no cups, no trinkets, no doodads, no bric-a-brac, no television, no chandelier, no toilet paper, no toothbrush. It was like a vacuum from God had come down and sucked out my house.
I was thinking that if the bottom floor looked like this, what if I went to the next floor and there were no clothes in my closet and my jacket with the five grand was gone? I ran up the stairs to my bedroom. Empty! No bed. No curtains. No desk. No pillows. No nothing. Ran into the closet, just in case. Nothing. There was no one, nothing, in the house. I can’t even stress the nothing enough. There wasn’t a thimble.
What I didn’t remember was that I’d had a casual conversation a few weeks earlier with a realtor and told him I was thinking of selling. I didn’t tell him that I’d done so much heroin in the house that the couch was high. The realtor told me that it would probably take about a year to get my price. But he’d found a motivated buyer, so the motherfucker sold my house in one week and my possessions were packed up and put into storage.
I was in a panic. It was midnight, I had one bad jones and no money. My entire life depended on getting money, so I drove back to my hotel and remembered that somebody in our crew would routinely get money in Europe by asking the front desk to advance him cash and charge his room account. Back at the hotel, there was a new girl on the all-night desk. I asked her for five hundred dollars.
“Oh, I’ve only been working here two days. I’m not familiar with that procedure,” she said. “Can you wait until tomorrow, when the manager gets in?”
“No, I can’t,” I said. “As a matter of fact, blah, blah, blah, lie, lie, lie, such and such and such. And I do it all the time.” I put the Jedi mind whammy on her and got the money and was out the door, straight down Olympic to my one-stop pool hall.
My stay at the hotel continued. I went to an American Express office and got more money, which meant more drugs. By then I was a walking skeleton with muddy, dead, no-one’s-at-home eyes. I was lying in bed, watching the local news, when I saw a report about the Jane’s Addiction reunion tour. It made me feel horrible that my friends were out playing music and I was alone in a hotel room, wasting away.
But I couldn’t stop. I changed hotels and kept the run going until the day of my thirty-fifth birthday, when I checked in to a rehab in Ventura called Steps. They took one look at my arms and figured I’d been shooting heroin for a few years straight.
“Don’t you worry about a thing. You’re going on a four-day mega-detox. We’ll wake you up for meals, but other than that, you’re going to be out. By the time we see you in a week, you’ll be detoxed, with no physical dependency on anything.”
I was like “Great. Where do I sign?”
I started getting the biggest combination of detox medication I’d ever been on: clonidine patches, chloral hydrate, Valiums, muscle relaxers. I was like rubber noodles the whole time, in bed with no arm or leg control, just goofazoid out. After three days of sleeping and eating, I woke up and thought, “I gotta go get high.”
I was still wasted on the detox medications, and I was a good hundred-odd miles from downtown. My main problem was that I couldn’t walk. They couldn’t legally keep me there, but they would never give me my car keys. I stood up and could barely steady myself in the room, but I was able to scheme and plot.
“All right, the office with the guy in it is down the hall,” I thought. “If I hold on to the wall the entire way to the office and get in there and lean up against a doorjamb, maybe they’ll think I’m okay.” I walked down that hallway holding on to the wall, went into the office, puffed myself up, thanked them for everything, and demanded my keys. After a minor argument, they conceded, but then I had to wait until no one was watching me so I could incorporate the wall into my normal walking rhythm.
It all worked out. I stopped at a bank and got as much
I flew up and checked in to the Ventura Inn. That first night I plowed through all of the heroin that I’d brought to gradually wean myself of, just gobbled it down like a pig. And so began the harrowing ordeal of kicking heroin once again. Luckily, I could eat when there were no drugs, but I started going through a horrible sleepless period of physical and emotional pain. I was experiencing a proper heroin withdrawal the likes of which I hadn’t for quite a long time. I’d make fires in the fireplace and get too hot, so I’d open the window and freeze to death. I couldn’t have a blanket over my legs, because it felt like pins and needles. Even the pillow hurt my neck.
After the first day, the hotel refused to send up room service, so I was forced to go down to the restaurant or walk a mile down a hill to a market. All that walking and fresh air started to bring me back to life. While I was there, I called up my boyhood pal Joseph Walters, who was living in Palo Alto and going through a catastrophe with his crazy-ass fiancée. He drove down, and we commiserated for a few days.
Somehow I found out that Jane’s Addiction was playing San Francisco, so Joe drove me up there and then went back home. Guy O was in town for the shows, so we went together. I was excited because I was starting to feel human again; plus, I was going to see my brothers. I went backstage and saw Flea and was all happy to see him, but he didn’t seem like himself. He was dressing differently and wearing eye makeup and changing his Fleaness to become Jane’s Addictionness, which I didn’t understand. I thought he’d be Flea in this other band, not a whole new persona. He seemed strangely distant. I don’t know if he was angry with me for being a fuckup or if he was on his own weird trip, but I accepted that he was in that mode.